As printer ink is shown to be more costly than vintage champagne, we uncover
other jaw-dropping price mismatches

Last week, it was revealed that printer ink costs more than three times as much as Dom Pérignon champagne. A bottle of the luxury vintage bubbly retails for around £109, or 15p per millilitre. A set of replacement cartridges for a home printer costs £45, which works out at 51p per millilitre. It is possible to buy a perfectly adequate printer for £35, making it less valuable than the ink you fill it with.

But are there other examples of everyday substances or services with astronomical pricetags? And is there anything that can make printer ink, let alone vintage champagne, look cheap in comparison?

1 Chanel No.5 is 79 times more expensive than Dom Pérignon champagne

A 750ml bottle of Dom Pérignon is £109. A small 7.5ml bottle of Chanel No.5 costs £86 at Boots. A wine bottle’s-worth would therefore cost 100 times as much – £8,600 – for which you could buy 79 bottles of Dom Pérignon.

A size-two pair of Agent Provocateur knickers weighs a little under 10g (approx one-third of an ounce) and costs £70. The knickers comprise 525 sq cm of fabric, giving a cost per square metre of fabric of £1,333. Or, to put it another way, they’re almost 17 times more expensive than the priciest fabric currently on sale at John Lewis, the Ptolemy Mann and Bluebellgray ranges, at £80 per square metre.

Valued by weight, the knickers cost £210 per ounce (£70 x 3), exactly 10 times the current £21-per-ounce price of silver. While they’re worth 10 times their own weight in silver, they’re just a fifth of their weight in gold.

3 Viagra is almost seven times more expensive than gold

They say that size doesn’t matter. But that doesn’t mean men won’t pay for it. Four 50mg tablets of Viagra cost £47 online at Lloyds Pharmacy, or £11.75 per tablet. There are 1,000mg in a gram, which is 20 x 50, so 1g of Viagra costs 20 x £11.75: £235. The current price of gold is £35 a gram. So Viagra is worth 6.7 times its own weight in gold.

4 Cinema popcorn is more expensive than the finest fillet steak

A small, 60g bag of popcorn costs £3.95 at a Cineworld cinema. That works out at £65.83 per kilo. The most expensive beef available on the Ocado website this weekend is the hand-prepared, muslin-wrapped Dry Aged Wing Rib of prime Aberdeen Angus beef, which costs £56.58 per kilo.

It was possible to track down pricier meat. The Freedown Food company imports US prime grade, grain-fed fillet steaks, which work out at £65.57 per kilo. That’s an awful lot for a chunk of steak. But it’s still cheaper than cinema popcorn.

5 It’s cheaper to fly from Gatwick Airport than park there

It costs £13 a day to use the Gatwick long-stay facility, or £91 a week. Two people flying from Gatwick to Milan on easyJet could leave at 7am on Thursday December 13 (when, for some reason, seasonal prices are at their absolute lowest), return on the evening of Wednesday December 19, and pay a total of £83.20 for their tickets – £7.80 less than their parking charge for seven days.

Or try this: you need to make a business trip to Milan and back. At 5.30am, you leave your car on the premium level of the short-stay car park. You dash to the easyJet flight, which costs £22.99 one way. It arrives in Milan at 09.55, you catch the 18.10 return flight (£18.61), and get back at 19.05. Having spent more than 12 hours away, you have to pay the full-day rate of £44 for your parking space – £2.40 more than the total cost of your flights.

6 A year in prison costs more than three months’ at the Savoy

It costs the government £47,000 a year to keep a criminal in prison. This weekend it was possible to book week-long stays at a bed-and-breakfast rate at the Savoy for £480 a night. Which means you could do a 97-day stretch in a Grand Deluxe King Room for the price of a 12-month sentence.

Grandstand tickets for the first two days at next year’s Royal Ascot meeting are £52 each per day. So you could go on successive days, spend £40 on champagne and bets, and it would still cost less than the clothes you stand up in.